Redirecting our school website to a Google Sites website with an Enom domain

[titch]

Hi all

 

Really stuck with this and have been going round in circles for a few weeks between our County web host / Google Apps people / Enom people. We currently have our old school website hosted by our county council at Orchard Junior School - Home. I want Orchard Junior School - Home to redirect to OrchardJunior where our new site is currently hosted. The new site is a "google sites" website and I have mapped it to OrchardJunior which is provided by the host Enom, which was setup when we installed google apps.

 

Now whenever county redirect the old address to the new one all I seem to get are errors. The message I recieved from the people at the county council was this.

 

What we have done is create a CNAME (i.e. alias) record in our DNS for Orchard Junior School - Home which points to orchard.com. If somebody enters the ..hants.. URL in their browser, then the hants DNS passes the request to the DNS which is authoritative for orchard.com, and that should return the ip address of the server which is hosting the new website. However, that server has to be configured to understand that if it receives a request for Orchard Junior School - Home then it should return the same frontpage as it would for OrchardJunior.

 

Every time previously that I have configured an alias for a school website, this has been resolved as a single ip address, and the hosting company have configured their system to recognise that a request for the old URL is mapped to the new website. However, in your case orchard.com appears to resolve to 5 different ip addresses. I don't know how these are selected in response to a website request, but it may be that there is a round robin system, which is why sometimes you get a "404" message, and other times you get the HPSN2 screen showing the blocked Enom address. I will try to determine why we get the "blocked" message, but maybe you can pass this note to Enom support and ask them to confirm that the correct addresses are being returned when we do an "NSLOOKUP" for the old URL name. The output from this is shown below. Maybe they can confirm whether or not their system needs some further configuration in order to respond correctly to Orchard Junior School - Home.

 

After contacting both Enom and google they each seem to suggest it is the other where the problem lies.

 

Now I don't profess to be a web expert but I figure this cant be that complicated and I am sure somewhere here knows what settings and where need to be changed.

 

 

 

Any help would be massively appreciated

[jamiess]

Is it possible for your council set up a 301 (Moved Permanently) redirect which will basically forward your .hants to your .com?

 

Jamie

[twin--turbo]

or upload a new index.html with a redirect in it at the old site to pull the new site.. Did this myself last week when I moved one of our websites out of a subfolder of the parent website onto it's own domain name.

 

Rob

[titch]

Is it possible for your council set up a 301 (Moved Permanently) redirect which will basically forward your .hants to your .com?

 

Jamie

 

I did ask this but it was something that I dont think they wanted to do. Not sure why not but may nag a bit more.

 

Cheers for the suggestion though (is useful just having the correct terminology in my head)

[titch]

or upload a new index.html with a redirect in it at the old site to pull the new site.. Did this myself last week when I moved one of our websites out of a subfolder of the parent website onto it's own domain name.

 

Rob

 

Thanks a lot for this. Have done this now and it works perfectly. Does it have any drawbacks? I.E does it get blocked by anything? Etc

[twin--turbo]

Thanks a lot for this. Have done this now and it works perfectly. Does it have any drawbacks? I.E does it get blocked by anything? Etc

 

it should be fine in most instances.

 

Rob